I grabbed my blanket from the bed and my tiger too. He was ratty and nearly bald and one of his eyes had popped off a long time ago, but I knew where we were going and it felt safer when he was there with me.
My sister took me under her arm and steered me down the stairs toward the kitchen.
I asked her, “Did you see the planes?”
“It’s the Allies,” she told me as she took a lantern from a high shelf and lit the wick. She tried to smile but didn’t quite manage. “They’re coming to help us.”
All of a sudden Albert was there too. He yanked hard on the metal bolt that kept the door to the root cellar closed.
“Are you going to hide with us?”
He shook his head, pulled the heavy wooden door open, and motioned for us to go down the three steps into the cellar. “I’m going to watch for the Americans.” He grumbled it like he wasn’t scared at all. “They’ll need to know where the Germans are.”
“Be safe,” Sabine whispered. She stared at him, then she pulled the door closed.
I didn’t like the cellar. Even though it was carved out of a dirt bank on the back side of the house and wasn’t really underground, it still made me feel like I couldn’t breathe right. Albert had lined the walls with bushels of twigs when the Germans weren’t watching. “It’ll keep the bullets and shrapnel out,” he said. But on nights like this, it didn’t feel like anything would keep the shooting from getting to us.
I went over to the stack of potato bags on the side wall and sat down. The crates on the dirt ledge above me were empty, but I still kind of remembered when they’d been filled with apples and carrots and potatoes.
Sabine rattled the bolt into place, the one Papa had put on the inside of the cellar door. Then she turned toward me. I thought she looked frightened, but I could see something strong on her face too. Maybe even something happy, like when you know you’re going to have the deer Albert found in the woods for supper, but you can’t let the Germans know.
An explosion rattled the empty jars in the basket on the ground next to me. I wondered if a bomb had fallen on someone I knew in the village ten minutes down the road. Like Lucien and his family. They didn’t have a cellar like we did.
Sabine jumped a little at the noise and put a hand on her chest. “They won’t bomb us,” she said. “They’re after the battery and we’re too far away. They won’t try to hit us.”
She looked at my face, then came over to sit down beside me. She wrapped an arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. I looked up at her and got worried when I saw the look in her eyes.
“Are we going to die?” I hadn’t meant to ask the question out loud.
Sabine took a deep breath and let it out, loud and long. “No,” she said like she was still trying to believe it. “No, we are not going to die.”
Part 1
Chapter 1
Winfield, IL
Modern Day
I woke to the sound of beeping and whirring machines. Faint pink light stole around the blinds spanning the huge window that looked out over a horseshoe-shaped courtyard, its terraced vegetation manicured to appear natural and wild. I felt the inflatable wraps on my legs fill with air and press my calves, as they had every few minutes during the night.
I’d woken each time, a bit disoriented by the “good stuff” still feeding into my veins from the IV pole next to my bed, and looked around the room, as I was now, trying to get my bearings. The night nurse’s name on the whiteboard. The remote on the mattress next to my right hand. The bathroom door just far enough away to remind me of my post-op weakness.
It felt like there was a weight on my chest. Inside it. Around it. The zip-up garment keeping everything—whatever was left—in place felt both stabilizing and stifling. I pulled the blanket back a little and looked down, taking in the two drains extending from each side of my rib cage and the unfamiliar flatness. Every glance since I’d woken from surgery had been preceded by fear and followed by a strange sense of relief and lostness. Relief that it was over. That my shower-time grieving was done and the operation that would alter my life—in ways I still couldn’t fully understand—was no longer something lurking in the future.
And lostness. The destabilizing sense that I’d been changed in subtle and overwhelming ways during those five hours in the operating room. There was a deep-rooted disquiet too—the kind that hums on the edge of consciousness, whispering, “You’ll find out” in a tone that is both threat and promise.
I pushed myself up farther against the inclined mattress, winced at the discomfort in my pectoral muscles, and opted for an ungraceful scoot instead. My legs and glutes still functioned well, but everything above my waist felt pummeled and encased.
I sighed. Closed my eyes. Breathed as deeply as I could without pain.
“Are you sleeping or picturing yourself in a bikini on a Hawaiian beach?”
A head of teased-high, pink-tipped gray hair poked around my hospital room’s door.
“If it’s the latter . . . honey, dream away. I’ll come back some other time.” Darlene’s stage whisper held a smile—the kind that borders on outright laughter. It wasn’t just a tone of voice for her. It was the way she lived her life.
She made a production of quietly closing the door and tiptoed toward the bed. “Don’t tell the nurses I snuck in!”
I glanced at the digital clock mounted on the wall next to the TV. “What are you doing out and about before seven a.m.?”
“Got my Zumba in a bit, but wanted to see how you fared overnight first. Besides,” she added, waving away her rule breaking with a slim hand, “the nurses know me. They wouldn’t kick out the human equivalent of a therapy dog.”
She winked and pulled the computer stool closer to my bed. Her white sneakers squeaked on the linoleum floor as she turned to perch her tiny frame on the seat. Her peekaboo leggings and figure-hugging Nike shirt likely hadn’t been designed with a seventy-six-year-old woman in mind, but they looked—in all their sparkly pink-and-gray splendor—as if they’d been custom-made for Darlene.
She glanced at the drains extending from my sides, then looked up at my face, lips twisted in disapproval. “I’ll gladly donate my entire estate to the inventor who can make those tubes obsolete.”
I tried to smile. “How about you donate it to someone who can make the surgery itself obsolete?”
She sighed and tilted her head to the side, taking a good look at my face. I saw her features soften as she leaned in to touch my arm—firm, but gentle. “Tell me how you’re feeling, Ceelie.”
Darlene had ushered something that felt like confidence into Room 268 on the post-op floor of Central DuPage Hospital. Survivors carried that with them, I’d found—the aura of possibility and overcoming. It’s what had first drawn me to her when we’d met in the waiting room of the Breast Health Center downstairs nine weeks earlier, both of us wrapped in pilling cotton robes, enveloped by muted colors, soft lighting, and barely audible elevator music.
She’d been sitting by the coffee station when the nurse led me in and left me with, “I’ll come back for you once the doctor’s had a chance to look at your images.”